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It's the lawsuit that won't die. More than six years ago, the entertainment giant Viacom sued YouTube for copyright infringement, arguing that the video sharing service was turning a blind eye to infringing videos uploaded by its users. A trial court judge rejected Viacom's argument in 2010, ruling that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor applied.

But last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit partially overturned that ruling, finding that YouTube employees may have been aware of specific cases of infringement and failed to act on that information. It asked a trial court judge to consider whether that claim was supported by the evidence.

On Thursday, Judge Louis Stanton sided with YouTube. While Viacom claimed YouTube knew about specific infringing videos and failed to remove them, Viacom was unable to point to any specific examples of clips YouTube failed to remove despite knowing they were infringing.

YouTube provided the court with a list of 63,060 clips that were eventually identified as copyright infringing, and asked whether Viacom could prove YouTube employees knew any of them were infringing while they were still on the site. In a January filing, Viacom admitted that "neither side possesses the kind of evidence that would allow a clip-by-clip assessment of actual knowledge. Defendants apparently are unable to say which clips-in-suit they knew about and which they did not."

Viacom argued that the burden of proof should fall to YouTube to prove that its employees didn't know those clips were infringing. But Judge Stanton rejected this argument, reasoning that it would defeat the purpose of the safe harbor if websites had to be able to prove that their employees didn't know content was infringing.

Unsurprisingly, Viacom wasn't happy with the result. "This ruling ignores the opinions of the higher courts and completely disregards the rights of creative artists," the company said. Viacom has pledged to appeal the decision. Again.